Brad Temkin’s Rooftop, published by Radius Books, gathers 65 photographs made on green roofs and rooftop gardens in cities from Chicago to Zurich. The subject is a practical one: planted roof surfaces that reduce the heat-island effect, manage storm water, and lower buildings’ carbon footprint. Temkin photographs these installations not as diagrams of environmental benefit but as landscapes, setting planting, soil, and open sky against the steel, stone, and glass geometry of the surrounding city. The result is an urban nature that feels neither wholly wild nor wholly engineered.

The pictures carry an argument through composition rather than caption. Rooftop gardens embody a contradiction the book does not try to resolve: nature as amenity, even luxury, within the same development patterns that keep displacing it. Temkin’s framing invites viewers to look at these spaces as places in their own right, with their own patterns, colors, and unobstructed relation to the sky, while remaining honest about the structures that contain them.

The book is a collaborative object. John Rohrbach, Steven Peck, and architect Roger Schickedantz contribute essays on the photographs’ aesthetics and intent, living architecture, design, and sustainability, and a 36-page booklet carries additional text and the plate list. The 110-page hardcover, bound with illustrated boards and issued in a clear dual-entry slipcase, was designed by David Chickey and David Skolkin. Text and image are deliberately separated, so the photographs stand as a sequence before commentary arrives.

For collectors of contemporary landscape and architectural photography, Rooftop is a focused project rather than a survey, one photographer’s sustained attention to a single subject across several cities. Its mix of environmental subject matter, urban context, and considered bookmaking makes it a representative example of Radius Books’ approach to the photobook as a designed, collaborative volume.